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Chapter 143: Chris Smalls on anti-Amazon activism and abolishing aristocracy

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Amazon is one of the largest companies in the world with over a million employees in the U.S. alone. A monolith responsible for trillions of dollars of revenue through retail, entertainment, and infrastructure.

But Chris Smalls took it on anyway.

Chris had worked at Amazon for 5 years before he was fired in March 2020 after leading a walkout at Amazon's Staten Island warehouse to protest pandemic working conditions.

"We all got radicalized at some point in our lives," he told me. "My life changed forever when I got fired from Amazon."

Chris used that motivation to work with his former colleagues to try to unionize the warehouse. The first attempt failed, but in March 2022 the vote passed, and it became the first Amazon warehouse in the United States to be unionized.

As of today Amazon has not come to the bargaining table and is pursuing multiple legal actions to avoid recognizing the union, including challenging the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Board.

What's going on?

I flew down to Hackensack, New Jersey to find out.

What really happened at that warehouse?

And what happens next?

Chris filled me in on life after the union drive, why he's been traveling the globe, his experience being under surveillance by Amazon and the police, what it's like leading protests at Jeff Bezos house, and why the Amazon Labor Union has recently affiliated with the Teamsters.

Chris calls bullshit on a lot of what we hear about labor organizing and reports on what's happening in the street. What can we learn from socialist countries? Why is the U.S. government reluctant to enforce antitrust regulations? What does fair human work look like in an increasingly algorithmic and AI-dominated society?

Pull up a white plastic chair beside us in Chris's backyard as he leans back behind dark shades and plumes of smoke to tell us how working at Amazon is like slavery, what's happening with human jobs as automation skyrockets, whether unions can be effective today, what politicians represent the working class, his 3 most formative books, and much, much more...

Let’s flip the page to Chapter 143 now...

Chapter 143: Chris Smalls on anti-Amazon activism and abolishing aristocracy

View full transcript here

CONNECT with CHRIS SMALLS

CHRIS’ 3 Books

  • First book (30:80)

  • Second book (43:36)

  • Third book (1:02:01)

WORDCLOUD OF THE CHAPTER

Quotes

  • “...every protest I've done in front of Jeff Bezos' house he hires the entire police department.” — Chris Smalls | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I get my news from the people.” — Chris Smalls | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Why you think I haven't been invited back to Congress? Because what they saw that day, it was like, oh, shit.” — Chris Smalls | 3 Books Podcast

  • “It feels like prison. Exactly what it does. Solitary confinement. You had a station, you had a square cubicle station moving in the same repetitive motion for 12 hours.” — Chris Smalls | 3 Books Podcast

  • “We all got radicalized at some point in time in our lives...my life changed forever when I got fired from Amazon.” — Chris Smalls | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Our quality of life in America is in the gutter. And that's because we're too complacent and we don't fight for better. We don't fight for anything. We fight for breadcrumbs.” — Chris Smalls | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I would love to not work 60 hours a week for the richest man in the world. You know, let me actually have a four day weekend and three days of work. A 10 hour shift or eight hour shift with an hour lunch. It's just simple things.” — Chris Smalls | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Some free Medicare would be great. You know, nobody should be paying for health care. Child childcare, the same thing. Childcare is ridiculous.” — Chris Smalls | 3 Books Podcast

  • “We got billionaires breaking federal law every day. Every single day a worker gets fired in this country for retaliation, for organizing, or discrimination, or fired for bullshit, whatever the case may be every day. Where's the accountability?” — Chris Smalls | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Amazon is the modern day slavery. That's just what it is.You know, it's slavery. Fast forward 400 years. Productivity. Calling us pickers. That's what we're doing. We're still continuing the process of slavery with some technology involved. And that's what it is. So slave wages, slaving conditions leads to injuries and death. And that's exactly why they're the number one in the country for injuries.” — Chris Smalls | 3 Books Podcast

  • “You know, we used to interact outside with kids. Kids don't do that no more. You know, they got iPads and TikTok. You know, we grew up in different times. And when Amazon got into this, you know, one day shipping, same day shipping, you know, same hour, the increase in the productivity, people don't see the behind the scenes. They don't see that there's 10 people that's going to touch that package before it gets to your door. The one person who's a picker has to pick this item in less than seven seconds.” — Chris Smalls | 3 Books Podcast

  • “It's a robot that brings it to you. And it comes to your station. You have to pick it off the robot. And that times you. They call it. So they got a robot to bring it, but they don't have a robot to pick it yet. That's what they're working on, you know.And for the last 30 years, there's been people picking these items and packing them. And the packers have a time they have to do it. You know, everything is timed. The moment you clock in. So people don't see that when they order in these packages. They just go on these websites. They fill up their carts. And then they think these packages magically appear. Or they see the driver. And they think that, you know, his job is this. He got it made because he has a brand on, Amazon. But it's not. You know, these are terrible conditions and they can be improved. And the company has the money to do it. But instead, they rather give it to the top.” — Chris Smalls | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I met the president. I met Kamala. And I took away nothing from this conversation. Nothing, absolutely nothing.” — Chris Smalls | 3 Books Podcast

Show Notes

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Chapter 142: Oliver Burkeman relishes reflection and reveals writing rituals

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Are you ready for a writing masterclass from one of the best self-help writers in the world?

After graduating from Cambridge, Oliver Burkeman wrote the popular column “This Column Will Change Your Life” in ‘The Guardian’ for over 15 years sharing his real-world, real-time poetic exploration of the self-help universe. In 2021 he published 'Four Thousand Weeks,' a literary examination of how we live today. Mark Manson (our guest in Chapter 28) called it “a reality check on our culture’s crazy assumptions around work, productivity and living a meaningful life” and Adam Grant (our guest in Chapter 72) called it “the most important book ever written about time management."

Oliver's work is much more about how to live a good life in the limited time we have than the system and hacks you find in other popular productivity books, and he’s just released a wonderful follow-up called 'Meditations For Mortals.' This book offers the reader 28 short chapters meant to be read one a day for 28 days, a quiet evening ritual with Oliver's potent words.

Naturally with such a talented guest, this Chapter dives deep into writing craft. How does a productivity writer focus on meaningful work? What does Oliver always have in his pocket on a walk to help him write? And what is his dream writing schedule?

But we also mine Oliver's brilliant mind in wide conversations that ask: What are the signs of living in a totalitarian state? What is Jungian analysis? Is promotion offensive? And why does Oliver wear earplugs even in silence?

Oliver Burkeman is my favorite self-help writer so it was a great pleasure that he joined me on 3 Books. Join me to learn how Oliver manages his writing projects, his 3 most formative books, the best question to ask before making big decisions, why mess is necessary, and much, much more.

Let’s flip the page to Chapter 142 now...

Chapter 142: Oliver Burkeman relishes reflection and reveals writing rituals

View full transcript here

CONNECT with OLIVER BURKEMAN

Oliver’s 3 Books

  • First book (19:21)

  • Second book (37:57)

  • Third book (1:16:23)

WORDCLOUD OF THE CHAPTER

Quotes

  • On launching a book “What I love at this stage is hearing from individual people who are making their way through it. It’s very self-selecting because you don’t really hear from anyone who hates it.” — Oliver Burkeman | 3 Books Podcast

  • “You’ve got to sort of have the right level of internal non-attachment to it, right? You can’t make it that how well the book does is the sole and final judgment on whether it was worth writing. — Oliver Burkeman | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I’m not in the mindset of a sort of maybe previous generation of writers who thought it was sort of somehow offensive that it’s their job to spread the word about a book.” — Oliver Burkeman | 3 Books Podcast

  • “What really marks out totalitarianism from other concepts like facism, dictatorship, tyranny, all the rest of it, is the notion that there’s no part of your inner soul that is beyond the reach of the central authority.” — Oliver Burkeman | 3 Books Podcast

  • “There are ways to choose not to be part of this kind of surveillance world today.” — Oliver Burkeman | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Success for a writer is not the same thing as success for a movie studio.” — Oliver Burkeman | 3 Books Podcast

  • “On some level, it’s self-help, right? I’m drawn to the ideas I think might help me.” — Oliver Burkeman | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I'm very sort of eclectic. This is what I think is part of what sort of British journalism experience means to me. It's the ability to sort of go out very quickly and find like a huge variety of little morsels that you can build into something.” — Oliver Burkeman | 3 Books Podcast

  • “If there are a lot of people out there who really want to make the case that perfectionism is an extremely good and motivating and wonderful value to live your life by, then I'm not going to be spending an awful lot of time with them.” — Oliver Burkeman | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Jotting things down I do on scraps and on index cards because something weird in my still recovering perfectionist psyche doesn't like just jotting things down in a very nice notebook.” — Oliver Burkeman | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I think I prefer writing books, but the way that I approach them is as partly as sequences of articles that then need to be sort of molded into a coherent whole. Yeah, I think ultimately I'm sort of proudest of books and there's a chance, it feels like there's a chance to really sort of burnish and polish a book that there often isn't with an article.” — Oliver Burkeman | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Some degree of huge mess is actually essential for me.” — Oliver Burkeman | 3 Books Podcast

  • “You can definitely be led into the misunderstanding of thinking that rigidity is your friend, that there's a way of doing, I think the sort of appeal that a lot of these very rigorous approaches have is it's the same as any kind of productivity technique or life rule, right? We want something that will do the living or the thinking or the writing for us. And there isn't such a thing.” — Oliver Burkeman | 3 Books Podcast

  • “The whole act of growth is seeing more and more of yourself.” — Oliver Burkeman | 3 Books Podcast

Show Notes

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Chapter 141: James Daunt on bespoke bookselling building Barnes and bonds

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James Daunt grew up in England the child of a diplomat—moving countries, tasting cultures, living a life with books and history at its core. He lived in Turkey and Cyprus before coming back to England for boarding school. After studying history at Cambridge, he didn’t know what he wanted to do, so the Career Services department pointed him towards investment banking across the sea in New York City.

He actually liked the job but his girlfriend thought it was incredibly boring and encouraged him to quit. He thought, "How do I combine my love of reading and my love of travel into doing something wholly different?"

The first ​Daunt Books​ independent bookstore opened on Marylebone High Street in London soon after. Unlike nearly every book store in the world he organized his books … by country. Not genre! But by place. Bookselling isn't an easy business! Lots of stores were going belly-up and profits were meager but over time he found a special knack for it.

He went to bookselling school, paid fairly, and took mentorship and development seriously. When big bookstore chains started falling in the wake of Amazon, and ​Waterstones​ was essentially the only national chain left in the UK, a wealthy entrepreneur bought it and asked James to lead it.

He turned the concept of a chain bookstore on its head, suggesting that stores would do better if the head office minimized itself and helped the booksellers operate like their own independent bookstores. Gone were planograms! Head office mandates! He tore up lucrative publisher deals spelling out which books to force onto the front tables to guarantee bestseller lists! He ripped up the rulebook completely. And what happened? Sales shot up. The chain survived ... then thrived.

When the new owners of Waterstones bought ​Barnes & Noble​—the largest bookstore chain in the world—they asked James to lead it, too. Today, James Daunt is the biggest bookseller on the planet overseeing nearly 1000 bookshops including his now-9 store Daunt Books indie chain, over 300 Waterstones, and over 600 Barnes & Nobles (including 65 new ones this year!!).

I was very excited when James said "yes" to coming on 3 Books. We go deep on learning from history, the role of bookstores in society, his most formative books, the best place to find a date, the key to customer service, leading from behind, and much, much more....

Let’s flip the page to Chapter 141 now…

Chapter 141: James Daunt on bespoke bookselling building Barnes and bonds

View full transcript here

CONNECT with JAMES DAUNT

JAMES’ 3 Books

  • First book (20:26)

  • Second book (48:37)

  • Third book (1:23:36)

WORDCLOUD OF THE CHAPTER

Quotes

  • “Books are in a very good place.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast

  • “What we can do within bookstores offer the serendipity of illogical choice, be that personal recommendations of booksellers or other customers or the chance of how displays and the interactions and juxtapositions of books alight upon yourselves.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast

  • “If you are interested in a country or a place then I think you need to read very broadly within it. You definitely need to read the history, but you also want to understand the anthropology, want to understand the novels, you want to understand the movies, you want to understand everything.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I think booksellers need to and can read body language. Is this somebody who’s looking to engage or not? Also customers, as they come into the stores, they know that the bookseller is lurking there, sort of the spider in his web.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Technology can be extremely helpful and dynamic, but if you want to get a reluctant reader, some young boy to read books, you're going to probably be most successful with a highly skilled bookseller whose passion is to encourage kids to read.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast

  • “One of the joys, I think, of reading history is that you read it to learn and to educate yourself, to consider and be able to reflect on current affairs with hopefully more intelligence and more insight, but also to be able to navigate through the prism of the writer.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast

  • “With empowerment comes responsibility.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast

  • “[Bookselling] remains a very ill-advised route to riches.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast

  • “If you want people to become really tenured and expert, then they need to work full time.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast

  • [On attention spans and reading.] “These are not new problems. I've been a bookseller for 35 years or something. I've predated really the internet. I've certainly predated e-books. I've certainly predated audio and podcasts and all of these things... And the reality throughout all of this is that how people are, the time people have available to read and the enthusiasm with which they read changes by not much.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast

  • “[Bookstores] do provide a community space that's inherently democratic in the sense that everybody can come inside it.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast

  • “We are the greatest dating place that there is. Forget the bar, forget the nightclub, forget everything else, come to a bookstore. That's where you can really meet people, see people.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I think there are people who lead from the front, and de Gaulle happened to have been one of those, and there are those who can lead from the back, and Lincoln was one of those. I think the latter, the Lincoln way of leading is, I think, generally, well, certainly the one that fits with my personality.” — James Daunt | 3 Books Podcast

Show Notes

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Chapter 140: Amy Einhorn on powerful pages and publishing possibilities 

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‘The Help’ by Kathryn Stockett. ‘Big Little Lies’ by Liane Moriarty. ‘Let's Pretend This Never Happened’ by Jenny Lawson. ‘American Dirt’ by Jeanine Cummins. ‘This Is How It Always Is’ by Laurie Frankel. ‘Listen for the Lie’ by Amy Tintera. ‘We Begin At the End’ by Chris Whittaker. ‘A Higher Loyalty’ by James Comey. ‘The Book of Awesome’ by Neil Pasricha.

What do these books have in common? The famed but invisible editor pulling the strings from behind the curtain: Amy Einhorn

Fifteen years ago my seven-month-old blog ‘1000 Awesome Things’ was nominated for ‘Best Blog’ from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. I was approached by literary agents and my new agent Erin Malone told me she wanted to auction my blog to publishers … next week. Suddenly I was in the foreign position of interviewing editors who were somehow clamoring to publish my book.

I signed with Amy Einhorn—a woman I’d never heard of, who had just started an eponymous imprint I’d never heard of, within Putnam Publishing, which I’d also never heard of. But I was immediately and magnetically attracted to her vision for the book. “It’s a hardcover, Neil,” she said. “It’s for moms. It’s a gift book. You gotta lose the frat boy posts. No blowing your nose in the shower. And I need a lot more new content.”

I learned everything about editing from Amy in our passionate late night diatribe emails, our hot-potato-ing of 300-page Word docs back and forth with 100s of comments in red down the sides, and arguing—good arguing!—about every single element along the way. I’d sit in her office and she’d have a variety of ‘cases’ laid out on her desk. “What do you think of 5” by 7”?” she’d say. “Too precious? Too cute?”

Amy is one of the most successful editors in the world today with the highest percentage of books edited hitting the New York Times bestseller list. According to a feature in The Observer, “New York editors and publishers speak of Amy Einhorn's success as the product of an almost mystical editorial instinct.” She has a knack for sniffing out voice, for knowing what will work and what won’t and, as you can imagine, I’ve been begging her to come on 3 Books for six years to hear how it all works.

So I flew down to NYC to talk with the bright, brilliant, and beaming Amy Einhorn about what an editor does, how a book gets published, what helps a book sell, Amy's 3 most formative books, and much, much more.

Let’s flip the page to Chapter 140 now…

Chapter 140: Amy Einhorn on powerful pages and publishing possibilities

View full transcript here

AMY’S 3 Books

  • First book (13:30)

  • Second book (47:02)

  • Third book (1:22:19)

WORDCLOUD OF THE CHAPTER

Quotes

  • “I remember I was dating a boy once and he said something about a trust fund, and I said ‘what’s a trust fund?’And I’d kept walking and he had stopped.” — Amy Einhorn | 3 Books Podcast

  • “All of publishing is about being an outsider.” — Amy Einhorn | 3 Books Podcast

  • “So much about publishing is having an advocate. And since all of it is subjective, you and I can read the same book and have completely different opinions about it, but you just need one person who is going to be messianic about your book and tell everyone they need to read it.” — Amy Einhorn | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I remember 1990, it was terrible the sky was falling—now you look back and those were the good old days.” — Amy Einhorn | 3 Books Podcast

  • “The book delivers something you can't get somewhere else." — Amy Einhorn | 3 Books Podcast

  • “A lot of people don’t write sex well, so usually I’m very adverse to, I’m very worried when some of my authors write sex and it seems like very purple prose.” — Amy Einhorn | 3 Books Podcast

  • “My literary authors always want to have more sales and my commercial authors always want to be perceived more literary.” — Amy Einhorn | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I’m not working in a coal mine, I have a great job. But it’s a bummer when you spend a whole weekend reading a book that falls apart.” — Amy Einhorn | 3 Books Podcast

  • “You’re kind of like, what is it? But I want it.” (on the mark of a good title) — Amy Einhorn | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I’m not working in a coal mine, I have a great job. But it’s a bummer when you spend a whole weekend reading a book that falls apart.” — Amy Einhorn | 3 Books Podcast

  • “If you’re a really good editor, you shouldn’t be able to see any of our work.” — Amy Einhorn | 3 Books Podcast

  • “My job is to help an author write a better book and reach as many readers as possible. But I’m not writing the book.” — Amy Einhorn | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Novels can speak more truthfully because people can just say ‘Oh, I made it up.’...Fiction allows us to get at truth in away that other forms don’t.” — Amy Einhorn | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Bookselling is about somebody handing you a book and saying ‘you should read this.’” — Amy Einhorn | 3 Books Podcast

  • “You just need one person to like your book.” (about getting published) — Amy Einhorn | 3 Books Podcast

Show Notes

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Chapter 139: Lewis Mallard valorizes visionary vandalism

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I was at a coffee shop on College Street when the barista Tony yelled “Hey! There’s that duck!”

I turned and, sure enough, out the front window was a…  duck. A giant pixelated-looking green-headed Mallard set atop a rubber-tire-sized body on top of orange-stockinged legs and a pair of orange Converse. And he was just … walking by.

Like some kind of interdimensional tumbleweed.

Uh, what … was this?

Some gimmick from the local radio station? An ad campaign for a boot company? I ran outside with my friend Ateqah and was puzzled that … she seemed to know him!

“Hiiiiiii Lewis,” she cooed. “You’re looking great, Lewis! How’s your day going, Lewis?”

He just … quacked at her.

I had so many questions: “Who are you? What are you doing? What is the meaning of this?”

But, of course, he just … quacked.

Ducks can’t talk!

Then he turned and did a 1920s-pauper-finding-a-penny-style heel-click a good three feet in the air and I was left standing on the sidewalk, stunned, with a big smile on my face.

I couldn’t let the story finish there.

Turns out Ateqah had been following Lewis Mallard on Instagram for years so when she saw him she knew who he was. She took a picture of us and posted it on her Instagram Story, after which Lewis Mallard picked it up, artistically edited it, and posted it on his own.

I learned Lewis Mallard is an anonymous ‘interdimensional psychedelic folk artist’ responsible for street performances and art installations across Hamilton, Toronto and, most recently, Victoria. Little duck-painted streetcar stations are popping up and, of course, the duck, in full quacking character, is being spotted on the streets.

Lewis’s work has been covered in all the local press in Toronto—CP24, City News, CTV, The Toronto Star, etc. In one of many pieces of coverage in CBC a person named J.J. Collins, manager of a local record label, said "Anybody who sees Lewis will tell the next person they see and say, 'Oh my God, I saw Lewis on the way to work today.' It's like finding the golden ticket."

Finding the golden ticket? I … love that. BlogTo calls Lewis a “Toronto legend” and a “viral folk artist” and was trumpeting him after he painted a Toronto streetcar stop to look like … himself.

There was this … allure, to me, of what Lewis Mallard *was* and what he was doing. Taking over the streets, creating art amidst dustry construction, and mapping rivers of love, humanity, and community through endlessly flowing change we all feel happening on the streets.

Lewis Mallard agreed to meet me in human form—though his face, name, and identity remain secret throughout this interview—on a bright orange bench on College Street outside the same Manic Coffee where I saw him the first time. Lewis and I parked in the hot sun in front of noisy streetcars, gaggles of teens, and one guy who (really) believes Lewis is a spy.

We share Manic's famous yogurt cups, ham and cheese croissants, and cookies—all homemade!—and discuss sacrifices for art, the power of the collective, the right amount of ‘bad,’ community through poverty, how to parent your parents, becoming an adult reader, what vandalism *really* is, and, of course, Lewis Mallard’s 3 most formative books…

Let’s flip the page into Chapter 139 now…

Chapter 139: Lewis Mallard valorizes visionary vandalism

View full transcript here

CONNECT with Lewis mallard

Lewis’s 3 Books

  • First book (32:50)

  • Second book (1:18:30)

  • Third book (1:30:16)

WORDCLOUD OF THE CHAPTER

Quotes

  • “I always wanted to be an artist ever since I could remember wanting to be anything, and I’m just trying to figure out how to do it.” — Lewis Mallard | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I spent a lot of time alone playing with myself, trying to get my parents attention and not ever getting it... I would throw shit from my diaper at them because I was probably angry at being left alone for so long. Of course I don’t remember doing that but I think it’s in my personality to do that.” — Lewis Mallard | 3 Books Podcast

  • “When I first discovered folk art I didn’t really appreciate it because I was really stuck in this mentality as a teenager that art had to be as high-skill as possible.” — Lewis Mallard | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I think there’s a lot of lovely magic that happens when people don’t completely understand what they’re looking at and then depict it in the way that they are able.” — Lewis Mallard | 3 Books Podcast

  • “It felt like just the right amount of bad.” — Lewis Mallard | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I was antagonizing in my own way. I would make my own t-shirts that said ‘Jocks Suck.’” — Lewis Mallard | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I was very angry at the world and I didn’t know why.” — Lewis Mallard | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I was never much of a reader. I had a difficult relationship with reading through school. I was in the remedial class.” — Lewis Mallard | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I was very good at realism and not much else. Drafting I was good at, mechanical drawing. These are things that came very natural to me. The creative making up stuff out of my head and putting that down on paper, to me that was amazing and I didn’t understand how people did it.” — Lewis Mallard | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I liked altering my surroundings. I liked the danger of it. Something that was bad but not catastrophic.” (regarding graffiti) — Lewis Mallard | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I look for places, objects that are not typical vessels for graffiti...This one in front of us I saw as a forgotten piece of street furniture that the city doesn’t have the time or energy to repaint...I look for the spots that nobody wants and that I see potential in, and I try to make them look nicer.” — Lewis Mallard | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I would love to see more creative, more interesting and well thought out public street art, graffiti. I would like to see people really think about what they’re doing and try to do it the best way they can.” — Lewis Mallard | 3 Books Podcast

  • “We were sharing a bed, we were washing our dishes in the bathroom, and we were eating rice, miso soup, and eggs three times a day. It’s all we could afford. I learned how to make a really good miso soup.” — Lewis Mallard | 3 Books Podcast

  • “The idea of the collective was that we were going to work on each other's work. We were going to try to remove the ego out of the art.” — Lewis Mallard | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I’m built like a bird. I’ve got thin bones.” — Lewis Mallard | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Every day I draw patterns as an exercise to do something solely for myself, and to develop a skill, and to see where it goes, and to see how good I can get at something.” — Lewis Mallard | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I started thinking thoughts I’d never thought before.” — Lewis Mallard | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I’m the only one telling me that I can’t do it, so what the fuck do I know? I’m just going to do it.” — Lewis Mallard | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I didn’t want any distinction between my art and my life.” — Lewis Mallard | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I think anybody listening is capable of a lot more than they think they are, and that if you give yourself a chance to amaze yourself you probably will.” — Lewis Mallard | 3 Books Podcast

Show Notes

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Chapter 138: Maria Popova mines meaning in marginalia

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Maria Popova was born in communist Bulgaria and emigrated to the U.S. six days after her 19th birthday back in 2003. She studied at the University of Pennsylvania after “being sold on the liberal arts promise of being taught how to live.”

Did it work?

Well, yes and no.

She spent her family’s life savings in the first few weeks on textbooks and, despite attending an American high school in Bulgaria, found herself in a bit of culture shock. “I mean, fitted sheets? Brunch?” She worked hard, a defining Popova characteristic, sometimes eating store brand canned tuna and oatmeal three times a day to get by. “I figured it was the most nutritious combo for the cheapest amount.”

At one of her jobs in 2006 a senior leader started sending out a Friday email of miscellany to provoke innovation and then Maria took the project on herself—weaving together write-ups on seemingly unrelated topics. One day was Danish pod homes, another the century-long evolution of the Pepsi logo, another on the design of a non-profit's new campaign to fight malaria. It was becoming clear: You never knew what you were going to get from Maria. And in an era of homogenization that was so ever-delightful.

Maria’s emails got popular and then she taught herself programming to put it all online on a site called BrainPickings.org.

I was blogging on 1000 Awesome Things every night in that internet paleolithic. I still remember so many times I’d be researching for some arcane bit of wisdom or trivia and Google would wisely fire me over to BrainPickings.org. I came to love the site which had a top-of-the-page tagline back then that read: “A scan of the mind-boggling, the revolutionary, and the idiosyncratic.”

And like my own blog’s 'About' page, this one didn’t reveal the author’s name, face, or identity. Was the internet just a bit more chat-room-anonymous back then? Or was this just before social media had been invented or figured out they needed our real names to maximize their ad revenues? Either way, Maria and I never got to know each other then … but, thankfully, a full 18 (!) years later the endlessly curious, cool, and erudite Maria Popova is ... still going.

George Saunders, our guest in Chapter 75, says Maria Popova manifests "abundant wit, intelligence, and compassion in all of her writings." Seth Godin, our guest in Chapter 3 says Maria "is indefatigable in her pursuits of knowledge and dignity. She does her work without ever dumbing down the work." And Krista Tippett, host of On Being, calls Maria a "cartographer of meaning in a digital age." Perhaps no surprise the ​Library of Congress has included her project, ​​The Marginalian​ (once called Brain Pickings), in their permanent web archive of culturally valuable materials.

I agree with the accolades and find Maria, her blog, and her wonderful books (‘Figuring,’ ‘The Snail With the Right Heart,’ 'The Universe in Verse,' and ‘A Velocity of Being’) truly exquisite and much-needed reflections of everything that makes life beautiful.

Like 3 Books, her site The Marginalian has remained free and ad-free over the years. Maria has no staff, no interns, no assistant, and The Marginalian is, in her words, “a thoroughly solitary labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood.”

The world can feel heavy, intense, and overwhelming—media, politics, and news pulls us away from those harder-to-measure things that make life wondrous. Love, connection, trust, kindness, passions, memories. The invisible but much-more-important guideposts that emerge as we look back on our lives from the end of it. That’s where Maria and The Marginalian rescue us—to point our attention towards the turn of phrase in a poem, a forgotten piece of advice from Ralph Waldo Emerson on trusting ourselves, or to provide a close reading with some stunning artwork from a 100-year-old picture book that helps illuminates one of those impossible-to-articulate emotions that we all share and feel…

I loved this conversation with the much-requested Maria Popova on a wonderfully wide-ranging set of topics including, of course, her 3 most formative books…

Chapter 138: Maria Popova mines meaning in marginalia

View full transcript here

CONNECT with MARIA POPOVA

MARIA’s 3 Books

  • First book (16:14)

  • Second book (55:29)

  • Third book (1:30:29)

WORDCLOUD OF THE CHAPTER

Quotes

  • “The self is a kind of book that is constantly being rereadand rewritten by the person living with it.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast

  • “The self is this narrative structure that we create as welive in order to feel coherent to ourselves.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast

  • “The living are not my forte.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Every allusion in a piece of writing is a kind of hyperlink to some other thing outside it, some idea or prior book. Every footnote is a hyperlink. If literature is the original internet, the mind is the original literature.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Our technologies of thought will always mirror the structure of the mind.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Creativity is this combinatorial thing, it’s a mosaic of pieces that we pick up because nobody’s born with knowledge.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Right now what I’m very troubled by is this whole thing about cultural appropriation because when you think about education, learning, that is appropriation. You are literally taking in somebody else’s knowledge and incorporating it into your own corpus of knowledge and calling it your own. That is what it means to learn anything. And so without appropriation, there could be no learning.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast

  • “If we’re not a little bit embarrassed of the people we usedto be, we’re kind of not doing it right.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast

  • “[A great poem] comes from a very personal place. If you wrote those poems from some extremely personal region of experience, then it zooms way out to the universal so that it's broad enough to be a perfect answer to pretty much any question. But then somehow it gives you back, you the reader back something deeply precise and personal out of the universal. That is what a great poem does.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I think the passion to create this drive, this life force is hardwired in us. It is part of our drive for connection. I mean, we create as a kind of hand outstretched in the dark for another hand.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Art is leaving something of sweetness and substance in the world.” (reference: ‘Cold Solace’ by Anna Belle Kaufman) — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I find identity the least interesting thing about people. Actually, identity and opinion. Unfortunately, we live now at a time and an era of identities and opinions being the kind of frontline to personhood.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Identity is a costume for the soul.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I think the most interesting things are the things that light us up, the things that are portals to wonder for us. And the thing about opinion is that it's based on certainty. To have an opinion is to have a certainty about something. And wonder is the opposite of certainty. Wonder is this openness to reality, whatever it may bring, and without fear, right? And a lot of... Opinion is based on fear a lot of identity is based on fear, and defining yourself by what you are not.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I watched the commodification of cultural material, which we now call content. That is heartbreaking. Calling someone’s labor of thought and love content. And the reason is that it fills the containers that we sell, which are ads. Everything is a commodity. Look at what we’ve done to music. We’ve really, really fucked up music. Musicians are now commercial vehicles for selling apps and subscription services.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Looking back on the history of culture, I see how important the power of modeling is, modeling possibility. You know, seeing someone do something you didn't think was possible makes you feel like it's more possible. And I do want to be the kind of test case for it working when it's a kind of cultural commons and not a consumerist thing. When young people are thinking about how to support their work, maybe turn to the community, maybe don't turn to the overlords of Silicon Valley.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I think our highest calling is to love the world. To love the world as it is and as we are.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast

  • “We too will one day be dead, and we might as well make something beautiful and meaningful in this sliver of spacetime that we’ve been allotted.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast

  • “It takes a great sobriety of mind to know both your depths and your limits.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Things that are difficult and get easier with time as you kind of harmonize and kind of learn the language and become immersed in this new world you're entering, which is when you read a book, you enter a world. When you enter a relationship with a person, you enter a world. If the difficulty subsides and the joy increases as time goes by, that is a good signal that just stick with it and push through the remaining discomforts and there will be a reward on the other side. If the difficulty increases and the heaviness and the friction increase, get out. Close the book, leave the relationship, just get out.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I don't think fear is the litmus test that is bad for you because we fear change. We are machines for homeostasis.We want to maintain the status quo, the comfort zone, and fearis a natural response to change. So in both cases, you can feel fear. The question is accessing yourself on the other side of the fear and then telling is this way to grow or is this a way to suffer?” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Language is not the container for thoughts and feelings. Language often times is thoughts and feelings.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast

  • “What I don't like about a lot of contemporary American children's literature is the saccharine nature of it. There's this total exclusion of complexity and darkness and sadness and this artificial sweetener of life. And I feel like that is such a disservice to growing minds and hearts and spirits.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Crying with someone is one of the greatest acts of intimacy.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast

  • “A war is essentially a combat of opinions gone to the extreme on the scale of nations.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Hope is the antidote to fear in bearing our future.” — Maria Popova | 3 Books Podcast

Show Notes

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Chapter 137: Jonathan Franzen finds fellow freaks and forges fantastic fiction

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I remember getting the knife.

It was near Christmas about 10 years ago and Leslie and I were zipping up a tiny suitcase before a beach trip with her grandparents and extended family. We weren’t married and I was making a desperate last-second plea to stuff a 576-page novel called ‘The Corrections’ by Jonathan Franzen into our bag. “It just won’t fit,” Leslie said. “You have … 100 pages left? Want to leave it and read it when we’re back?”

I did *not* want to do that.

The book was slipping under my skin—serrating my soul.

So I remember getting that knife.

The deep blasphemous pain I felt slicing the paperback spine and carving the last 100-ish pages off the book was far outweighed by the exquisite suite of pleasures I had slowly savoring it on the beach all week.

I had never read anything like ‘The Corrections’—with a clarity of character, wildly spinning plot, and unique three-dimensional *realness* that, page by page, twist by twist, left pits in my stomach, lumps in my throat, and tears in my eyes.

The book single-handedly elevated what I thought books could do.

I read ‘Freedom’ (2010), ‘Purity’ (2014), and ‘Crossroads’ (2021) the same way—equal parts admiration, fascination, and with a psychologically-transporting feeling of living outside of myself.

Jonathan Franzen is one of the most successful, accomplished, and decorated writers in the world. He is a Fulbright Scholar, National Book Award Winner, Pulitzer Prize Finalist, PEN/Faulkner Finalist, 2x Oprah’s Book Club Pick, voted to TIME’s ‘100 Most Influential’ list as well as gracing their cover as "Great American Novelist," and much, much more.

The NYT calls his books "masterpieces of American fiction," NYMag calls his books "works of total genius," and Chuck Klosterman writing in GQ says "Franzen is the most important fiction writer in America, and—if viewed from a distance—perhaps the only important one.”

Tall praise! But there is just nothing like a Jonathan Franzen novel and it was sheer delight going deep with the master of the deep to discuss writing advice, the magic of the written word, what heroes look like today, competing with David Foster Wallace, the best thing we can do for the climate, Jon’s 3 most formative books, and much, much more…

Let’s turn the page to Chapter 137 now…

Chapter 137: Jonathan Franzen finds fellow freaks and forges fantastic fiction

View full transcript here

CONNECT with JONATHAN FRANZEN

JONATHAN’S 3 Books

  • First book (38:50)

  • Second book (1:27:58)

  • Third book (1:58:06)

WORDCLOUD OF THE CHAPTER

Quotes

  • “There is a magic to the written word, and particularly the written word in a novel where you, as a writer, put a vision on the page into this very limited alphabet, 26 letters and a couple of punctuation points, and somebody decodes that, and they could be decoding it down the street or they could be decoding it 150 years later. And from that code comes this whole world and with it the person who created that world initially.” — Jonathan Franzen | 3 Books Podcast

  • “We have finite lives and very finite time for reading and there are five to eight orders of magnitude more books than I could ever read in my lifetime, and it does seem a shame to spend time reading crap.” — Jonathan Franzen | 3 Books Podcast

  • “It is a luxury to engage with things in a complicated way.” — Jonathan Franzen | 3 Books Podcast

  • “There was a time I thought it was a moral failing that you didn’t want to engage with complicated art, nuanced art, moral ambiguity, contradictions in character...I used to look down on people in my youthful arrogance.” — Jonathan Franzen | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Literature defined by its defiance of cliche.” — Jonathan Franzen | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Kids are not innocent little creatures. Kids are full of all sorts of bad stuff. They’re greedy and selfish, and they’ll go to considerable lengths to get what they want. If they’re not sociopaths, they’ll grow out of it. But kids are bad and they experience real remorse for that, and they also live with this awful sense of how bad they are.” — Jonathan Franzen | 3 Books Podcast

  • “[My mother] was very disapproving of the idea of my becoming a novelist. You’re going to lie for a living? That doesn’t sound right.” — Jonathan Franzen | 3 Books Podcast

  • “What does a hero look like in 2023? It looks like a teacher in a Florida school teaching forbidden books.” — Jonathan Franzen | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I’d always thought it’d be cool to be a writer. Lot’s of free time, and sit around, make stuff up and you get paid for it. You become famous. That sounded great. I wanted to do that.But I didn’t imagine myself as a literary writer.” — Jonathan Franzen | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I want to write a novel because I’m happy when I’m writing a novel. It’s like I’m alive when I’m writing a novel and part of me is just not really alive when I’m not. It is the story of my life that I’ve spent most of it not writing novels, therefore not really, fully alive.” — Jonathan Franzen | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Dialogue is more art than science. People don’t actually speak the way they do in my books. It’s a little magic trick.” — Jonathan Franzen | 3 Books Podcast

  • “It’s a lot like really, really wrapping your mind around your own mortality to wrap your mind around the mortality of this nice familiar world we live in that’s going to be horribly stressed in the coming years and decades, and will probably be unrecognizable a century from now.” — Jonathan Franzen | 3 Books Podcast

  • “You could take the futility of individual action as permission to behave however you want. I would argue that it doesn’t make it right to do that, and that it’s good to try and live your life the way you wish everyone else did.” — Jonathan Franzen | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Anything you can do to make the world a kinder and more stable place is a climate action.” — Jonathan Franzen | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Take a hard look at every sentence. Shake it. Shake it again. I guarantee you, it can be better.” — Jonathan Franzen | 3 Books Podcast

Show Notes

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Chapter 136: 3 St. Louis Uber drivers on bullets, bruises, and babies

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I just got back from St. Louis.

It was my first time there and I met a wonderfully rich collection of people who I’m so excited to introduce you to in a special on-the-ground, in-the-street, from-the-backseat Chapter of 3 Books.

On the way from the airport to the hotel, the driver regaled me with St. Louis trivia from a deep well of St. Louis pride. “Did you know we hosted the World Fair and the Olympics the same year?” he asked. I knew about the World Fair! “Most do,” he said. “But not many know about the Olympics. 1904 was a banner year here. We were the fourth largest city in the US at the time!”

The next day I had time to explore. I knew there was a local bird species that didn’t exist anywhere else in the country! The Eurasian Tree Sparrow was one of six species of birds brought to St. Louis in 1870 by German immigrants. The other five died that winter, but the Tree Sparrow still lives near Lafayette Park where it was first released. It has thrived without expanding its range or disrupting the local ecology.

After I got an address to try and find the birds, I hailed an Uber and met Jacqueline, who drove a bus in town for 27 years. When I asked her for the best thing about St. Louis she said, “Nothing! Watch your back or somebody gonna put a bullet in your head.” Our raw conversation touches on the erosion of community, the deprioritization of connection, and how we might find new kinds of support in our disconnected world. “My family is whoever loves on me,” Jacqueline said. “Blood makes you kin but it doesn’t make you family.”

I then met Deneane, a 28-year-old single mother of five who does drop-off, pick-up, and evenings solo every day while driving Uber thirty hours a week, working at a cupcake shop, and running a small business online. We went to the Gateway Arch and Left Bank Books together while talking about enduring—after her mom found bruises all over her body, she left her abusive relationship and “found the strength to start over.”

The next morning I gave the talk that sent me down there and then got a final ride to the airport with Albano from Albania, who left his job as a public school teacher in Florida to make more than double as a driver. “Unfortunately,” he said, “if teaching was something others would care about, teachers wouldn’t leave the profession.”

I hope you feel a kinetic pulse listening to stories from people whose stories aren’t often told. Get ready to laugh, cry, and connect hearts as we tether ourselves to the human connection that exists around us every day.

Let’s head down to St. Louis and hang out with Jacqueline, Deneane, and Albano as they share the love and connection we are always searching for on 3 Books.

Let’s flip the page to Chapter 136 now…

Chapter 136: 3 St. Louis Uber drivers on bullets, bruises, and babies

VIEW FULL TRANSCRIPT HERE

3 Books

  • First book (34:54)

  • Second book (43:49)

  • Third book (56:18)

Word Of The Chapter

Quotes

  • “Watch your back or somebody gonna put a bullet in your head.” — Jacqueline | 3 Books Podcast

  • “This majority white over here. That's why you're seeing the birds. If it wasn't, they'd pack their shit and they be gone.” — Jacqueline | 3 Books Podcast

  • “We used to have a candy truck... a quarter would get you half the fucking truck.” — Jacqueline | 3 Books Podcast

  • “My family is whoever loves on me...blood makes you kin; it doesn’t make you family. — Jacqueline | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I’m real self-sufficient, I can get-it-done kind of woman. I do it all for myself.’” — Jacqueline | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Be open to receive.’” — Jacqueline | 3 Books Podcast

  • “People really just are people.’” — Jacqueline | 3 Books Podcast

  • “My mom found out because she could see the bruises.” — Deneane | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Raising healthy children, being happy...having peace...conversations with my kids...watching them grow, watching them develop...I want to see them blossom.” — Deneane | 3 Books Podcast

  • “If teaching was something others would care about, teachers wouldn’t leave the profession.” — Albano | 3 Books Podcast

  • “They don’t have to work like me, every day, getting up at 4.” — Albano | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Every kid is able to learn and to succeed.” — Albano | 3 Books Podcast

Show Notes

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Chapter 135: Cal Newport severs cell subservience to steep slow success

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Cal Newport is a guide, a visionary, a role model to me and millions of others on living an intentional and productive life amidst our noisy, scatterbrained, tech-drenched world.

He’s an MIT-trained computer science professor at Georgetown University and author of 10 books which have collectively sold over 2 million copies including ‘Deep Work,’ ‘Digital Minimalism,’ and his latest bestseller, ‘Slow Productivity.’

“I sometimes joke that my entire career is built on giving two-word terms to things everyone thinks and knows,” Cal says, but the truth is he’s doing a lot more than that.

Take ‘Slow Productivity.’

He’s boiled this new phrase down into three principles: 1) Do fewer things, 2) Work at a natural pace, and 3) Obsess over quality.

Sounds simple, right? Trite, even! But that’s when you raise your head and realize the world is conspiring against you doing any of these. Doesn’t our world today reward… doing *more* things, working at an *unnatural* pace, and obsessing over *quantity*?

There’s a reason Cal has no social media apps on his phone. Why he has no social media accounts at all…and never has! With his books, and his wonderful podcast ‘Deep Questions,’ he is focused on helping us find our way as we navigate ever-changing technology and work patterns that increasingly feel at odds with our shared quest of living intentional lives.

Cal has a giant mind and it was on full display in this chat as we discuss: how Cal measures success, the neuroscience of reading, Denis Villeneuve, the relationship between rest and work, the ideal age for unrestricted Internet access, The Washington Nationals, leetspeak and productivity pr0n, the role of books today and their future, Andrew Huberman, positive reinforcement theory, Jonathan Haidt and ‘The Anxious Generation,’ technology boundaries for children, and much, much more…

Let’s turn the page to Chapter 135 now…

Chapter 135: Cal Newport severs cell subservience to steep slow success

View full transcript here

CONNECT with CAL NEWPORT

CAL’S 3 Books

  • First book (26:35)

  • Second book (1:17:53)

  • Third book (1:49:09)

Word Of The Chapter

Quotes

  • "Books are the best bargain in the human intellectual experience." — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast

  • “When is it appropriate for someone to get unrestricted internet access? The safe answer is 16." — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I think young people have been given this idea—this comes out of the social media companies themselves—that you can just be vulnerable and visible and open, that that’ll just alchemize into being really valuable. That's not the way it works. You still need craft. You still need to do something.” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast

  • “If you have a term that people aggressively agree with, and then begin riffing on hearing nothing but the term, you're probably hitting on something." — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I sometimes joke that my whole career is built on giving two-word terms to things that everyone thinks and knows.” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Books are the only mind reading of any sort of great bandwidth. I can take years of thinking and transport that to your brain by giving you this artifact of information captured with characters that I'm handing off to you. I think this is why books have been durable through so many different media revolutions. It's hard to replicate what you get out of that.” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast

  • “What I grew up with being around these books is that feeling of advice book, that feeling of suddenly your internal schema of understanding the world shifts in a way, where new opportunities for you that are very exciting emerge that just feel so good. And it's such a high, and you can induce that with paper.” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast

  • “We're not evolved to read. We have to hijack parts of our brain that were evolved to do other things, we have to hijack them and basically force them to do this very unnatural thing. But once we do, it works so synergistically with us, like a cultural discovery accident." — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast

  • “You can have a system for how you do things, and that system can make things better, and you can let the system take on a lot of the work.” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Systems can’t get you all the way to impact. Systems can’t get you to the meaningful life. Systems can help save energy.” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Once we all got connected to digital devices in the office the amount of work on our plate and the speed and velocity at which it came at us just exploded.” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast

  • “To me phone is a misnomer. It's unrestricted internet access -- that’s the danger” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast

  • “We used to worry like, 'What if our three-year-old sees too much Sesame Street?' That's not the concern now. Now the concern is the 13-year-old with the iPad in their room and if you try to take it away they’re going to have an aneurysm." — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I think people misunderstand 'Walden'. They think it’s a nature book. It’s not a nature book. What 'Walden' really was was an incredibly erudite self-help book.” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast

  • “[Walden] really inspired me to consider radical ideas as the foundation of writing” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I love that feeling of destabilizing something you took for granted and when you destabilize it it opens up all these alternatives and new opportunities for you” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I wish more people were less afraid.” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Friday after I’m done with work until Sunday I try not to do any work, any email, any looking at content meant to get you excited. It’s family time, it’s reading time, it’s go on adventures time." — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast

  • “If you’re writing a book the thing that matters is writing the book that delights you. That’s your best chance of changing minds and making an impact.” — Cal Newport | 3 Books Podcast

Show Notes

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Chapter 134: Susan Orlean on lusty ledes and literary lessons for life

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I got an email from longtime 3 Booker Bo Boswell who told me he found an enticingly-titled thread on reddit called “What’s your field or study (hobbyist or professional) and what’s a cornerstone beginners book for that topic/field?”

The most upvoted reply on the thread read: "Librarian here, Susan Orlean’s ‘The Library Book’ is at first glance a true-crime book about tracking the arsonist who set fire and burned down the main library in Los Angeles, but it also gives a comprehensive glimpse into contemporary libraries and their issues, especially updating a view of them if you haven’t been inside one since you were a kid."

Bo picked up the book, loved it, and then wrote to me that "the amount of research and bizarre detail Orlean puts into her work is so engrossing.” Bizarre detail! I was convinced. I picked up ‘The Library Book’ and it blew me away. Reading it was like … wandering a library. Surprising curiosity trails at every turn. I ended up putting the book in my Best Of 2023 and then went deeper into Susan Orlean’s back catalog where I found myself reading profiles like ‘The American Man, Age 10’ and a series of fascinating but unconventional obituaries about people like the inventor of Hawaiian Tropic or the first magician on the Las Vegas strip.

I’ve come to think of Susan Orlean as one of the best non-fiction writers on the planet. She’s been a Staff Writer for ‘The New Yorker’ since 1992 and has written more than 10 bestselling books including ‘The Library Book’, ‘On Animals’, ‘Saturday Night’, and ‘The Orchid Thief’, which was turned into the movie ‘Adaptation’, starring Meryl Streep in her Oscar-nominated role as … yes, Susan Orlean.

Susan has an endless, unbridled curiosity — that ‘bizarre detail’ — which you’ll see on full display in this conversation which begins by talking about how she organizes her shoes! She’s a writer’s writer who offers us a  true masterclass and always reminds us that “storytelling and knowledge-sharing is the essential human experience.”

We talk about organizing shoes and spices, what books do that nothing else does, finding the balance between professional and amateur, the genius of container ships, what great book design does, how to cultivate your writing voice, how you might organize your book, facing the fear of failure, LSD, the power of libraries, Susan’s 3 most formative books, and much, much more…

I am so excited to share this conversation and hope you’ll find it as endlessly inspiring, thoughtful as I did.

Let’s jump into Chapter 134 of 3 Books now…

Chapter 134: Susan Orlean on lusty ledes and literary lessons for life

CONNECT with Susan Orlean

Susan’s 3 Books

  • First book (1:26:15)

  • Second book (1:52:21)

  • Third book (2:30:46)

Word Of The Chapter

WORDCLOUD OF THE CHAPTER:

Quotes

  • “You have an experience of the person before you actually have an experience of them.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Humanity is into taxonomy. I mean, it’s a human impulse to find and categorize and index and organize.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “At the end of the day, it is a very commercial thing to cure a disease. People make money.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “This human impulse to organize and categorize probably is most explicitly shown when we think about books and knowledge and information. The idea of organizing the mental output of writers throughout history and to have come up with a system that, while it's not perfect, it's withstood the test of time, but also to begin to allow us to impose some kind of order on books is pretty extraordinary.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “[A book’s design] is the physical manifestation of what a book is all about.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “The closeness between our human soul, as it were, and a library, and how – while the connection might not seem that obvious – the way in which a library contains dreams and knowledge and facts and history and memory, and really, the whole of human experience is much the way a person contains dreams and memories and knowledge and fantasy. We contain our own personal library of thoughts.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Many of us have had this experience of trying to remember something, and you almost feel like you’re flipping through a card catalogue. ‘No. No. Not that… That’s what I’m trying to remember!’” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “[Libraries] are the collective mind of a community.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Storytelling and knowledge sharing is the essential human experience. Books are just the means by which we do it. It’s how we exist together – we tell each other stories.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “A book is almost like a whisper.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I don’t want to say rant – what’s the positive word for rant?” “Rant!” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I felt like it was a way that I could signal the tremendous contradictions of his life without saying, wow, it's pretty weird to be a cab driver but also be king.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I’d like to feel that I’m both a professional and an amateur, in the sense that, I bring to my work, the same degree of joy and surprise that I have felt since the very beginning. And that I don’t look at as ‘just gotta make a widget.’ But when it comes to work habits and discipline, I’m very much a professional, and I’m proud of it.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I do love fiction that does that, that tells a very intimate story but in a context that is a character in its own right.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I loved [The Sound and the Fury] so much that I was rereading it while I was reading it.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Writing is very humbling. And if you think because you’ve written lots of books or written for ‘The New Yorker' or had a bestseller that the next sentence you write is going to be easy then you are sorely mistaken.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I often like being funny when I don’t have to tell a joke.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I think your ultimate goal always is to try and have your writing sound as much like your actual way of expressing yourself as possible. And that seems like a simple goal but it’s actually very challenging.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “It is certainly a way to learn how to write, is to read people whose work you love, and say, I somehow want to achieve the same thing, but in my own voice.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “I don’t see a conflict between having that kind of orderly drive, which I think of as ‘professional,’ and having the vulnerability and openness that an amateur might have.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “[As a journalist] it doesn’t really matter what I think–although I’m not gonna hide from you what I think–but what I’m really here for is to be your Virgil and to show you this world that I’ve uncovered.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Storytelling and knowledge sharing is the essential human experience. Books are just the means by which we do it. It’s how we exist together – we tell each other stories.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “It’s meaningful for us to know the way other people are living.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “Finding a voice is the ultimate challenge. And I think the only helpful thing I can is that–the great surprise is discovering, it’s a little like The Wizard of Oz, that you were home all alone. Your voice is the voice you have in the world all along. And what makes writing hard is we get tense, we get self-conscious, you sometimes feel like you don’t even know how to say a simple sentence. But the truth of the matter, and I find it funny, the more experienceI have, the closer and closer it is to how I would’ve sat down and told this story to you.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “There is such a clear black and white. Things are either true or they’re not true. Facts either happened or they didn’t. It just doesn’t seem hard to me to... And I think readers deserve to know that if they’re reading non-fiction... it’s factual.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “It was frankly more appropriate that I never saw a Ghost Orchid, the way most of us never achieve this perfect thing that we aspire to. It also was true. I didn’t see a Ghost Orchid.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

  • “This will sound perhaps obvious, but why not: read read read, and then write and write and write. Not to take too much away from Nike, but really, if you love writing, and you want to do, you just gotta do it.” — Susan Orlean | 3 Books Podcast

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